Hey everyone, and welcome to Android Amusements. We took a week off there, but now we’re back with ThumbZilla. As you know, this column is about flights of fancy. When Jeremy Hill or I discover that time of the week is rolling around, we head to the Google Play Store or Amazon App Store and grab something that catches our eye. I decided to take a chance on a popular game under $1 and ThumbZilla stood out.ThumbZilla is an infinite stomper game, which I didn’t even realize was a genre now. A player holds their tablet or smartphone in portrait mode (vertically) with his or her thumbs at the bottom of the screen. Then, the player moves their thumbs one over the other on screen to move through the city. To squish people or destroy vehicles and buildings, tap or swipe across them. The score is represented in the amount of damage done to the city. The game continues so long as the thumb monster has health, but if the military’s attacks hit your thumbs, that can decrease.

As long as someone goes in knowing what ThumbZilla is, a brief time-sink to kill five or ten minutes with no goals, I’d say it’s a worthwhile purchase. It’s definitely geared towards players with short attention spans who also enjoy over-the-top cartoon violence. Some parents may not like that though, as it is quite bloody.

Still, I find the lack of goals odd. It doesn’t seem like it would have been terribly difficult to implement a system where additional points or a cosmetic change for the monster feet would be awarded if someone did something like destroy 30 cars in one run. It would have provided an incentive to keep playing and coming back. Perhaps even start at a lower difficulty level initially, then have that increase as challenges were completed.

But then again, maybe it wouldn’t. ThumbZilla looked the same every time I played it. There was only one location and a set number of people, cars, buildings and other items I could stomp.

Also, you should know there is no exit option. You have to force close ThumbZilla to exit the app. Sometimes that happens with Android apps though, so just know that you’ll have to tap the back or home button to get out of here and may want to check the running processes to be sure it closed.

Honestly, I wish there was a free version of ThumbZilla. If there were, I’d recommend the hell out of that. That’s pretty much what this app feels like it should be. There are better free games out there with more structure and replay value than this, so I’m going to say save your $0.99 and go for one of those instead. Wait and see if a ThumbZilla sequel with more content comes along.